To beat Cats, think fast and play like it’s your last

If you can keep Kilkenny from scoring goals you’ve a huge obstacle cleared, suggests Donal Óg Cusack.

They say that only 50% of marketing works and that they don’t know what 50% it is. I played in five All-Ireland finals. Won the first when I was clueless. Lost the last when I knew it all.

All you can do is sift through the pieces afterwards and wonder what worked and what didn’t. I know that I played Kilkenny four times in finals. Kept clean sheets twice. Conceded a goal each in the other pair of games. We won when we had the clean sheets. We lost when they got goals. Those goals were like a body blow.

If you can keep Kilkenny to no goals, you have a big chance.

You’ll need a break every now and then but it can be done. You have to track them all over the field. Shefflin is the king of it. Sometimes he moves around the field like a ghost. They will always create the overlap because face it, they have the skill and the strength. And the pattern. You have to have enough bodies in there to compensate for that. Bodies everywhere. Every time they cross a line with the ball in possession, your players are dropping back a line and as they get nearer your goal, they are funnelling into a narrower shape, protecting the D. Everybody moves.

Your half-backs drop back, your midfield and half-forwards flood into the space.

You have to do it. It’s possible. But it also wears you out.

If they get a goal, don’t mourn. You haven’t time. Kilkenny do the double dart like no other team. In the minutes after they score one goal, they step it up looking for the next one. They kill you, then they burgle your house while you’re grieving.

If you go for a targeted puck-out strategy, and it breaks down, Kilkenny will more often than not go for a goal from the possession they gain. They know there is nothing worse than a short puck out gone wrong and punished with a goal. Cold as assassins.

What to do? I am convinced that the key to modern hurling (and football, because in Cork we know all these things) is that the most important rule is that sometimes the rule isn’t important. By that I mean that everything has to have flexibility built in. There’s no such thing as an all-out attacking team not vulnerable to a sucker punch. No such thing as an out-and-out defensive team that can’t be opened up.

Deeper down, there’s no such thing as a team which only marks zonally or a team which only marks man for man. If you commit one 100% to either, your lack of flexibility will kill you.

When you play Kilkenny or any top team, your lines, all of them, need to be working their way back down the field as soon as the opposition looks likely to pass their own 45-metre line. Your half-forwards need to get to the middle of the field, your half-backs have to be dropping back into the holes. Midfielders and half-forwards should appear in some of the gaps. You start as man to man and when the siren goes, the bodies sweep back like a tide, and for a second two they go zonal. Your right half-back knows where in relation to the D he has to go. So does your left half-back, your midfielder. When they get there, they know to pick up men again. They go man to man. Then zonal. Then man to man. Bodies coming back all the time.

Your defence knows that somebody is going to have to go towards the ball and that somebody is going to have to sweep into the hole left behind when they commit.

They know this because they have spent hours and hours and hours doing this on training fields. It’s boring and it’s hard work but it has to be done.

Look at one of Kilkenny’s goals back in the 2012 semi-final with Tipp. Kilkenny nine points to seven up. The Tipp forwards waste a ball that they should have recycled.

From the puck-out, the ball breaks to Shefflin. If Shefflin wore a dayglo shirt, he’d still manage to be invisible on the pitch when he needs to be.

So Shefflin picks the ball about 50 yards out in the right half-forward position.

In any language, that’s an emergency. At this point, there are more Tipp defenders than Kilkenny forwards closer to the goal. That sounds good but against Kilkenny, it can still turn into a dire emergency.

When Sheff gets the ball, Thomas Stapleton the Tipp right half-back is marking Aidan Fogarty. Stapleton and Fogarty are 10 yards closer to the Tipp goal than Shefflin is. Stapleton takes a look to make sure Fogarty is still with him. He is. All grand. Job done. Fogarty doesn’t do anything to alarm the defender. He stays out of the traffic. He delays any sudden movements until Shefflin has left the area.

You know the rest. Shefflin moves towards the D. When it’s too late, all hell breaks loose. Padraic Maher does his best to stay but finally has to commit. TJ Reid says go ahead there and commit. Sheff flicks a brilliant handpass (with his right hand) to Reid at just the moment when Maher goes. Goal. Tipp hung on their own man-to-man tactic.

The minute Tipp’s half-back line was broken, Stapleton needed to be streaming back, defending the D and picking up new players when they got to their assigned zone.

Instead, he stayed man-marking and Kilkenny played them for suckers.

That’s the picture Sunday. No iron rule will win it for either team. All the nonsense which has blown around this year about wristy hurlers and manufactured hurlers.

The greatest asset you can have are thinking hurlers who can play. Shefflin would be the first to say himself that he manufactured himself through sheer hard work.

What has brought him to the edge of 10 All-Ireland medals is his ability to think.

He nearly always does the right thing. If he’s coming into the action with 20 minutes to go on Sunday, Tipperary will have to recharge all the batteries in terms of focus and concentration.

Thinking and working will be the difference. I’m looking forward to seeing Seamus Callanan and JJ Delaney. Here’s the cliché. Callanan has been a scorer, has started setting scores up too. He has turned into a talisman. JJ is the old veteran. One last shoot-out in Tombstone.

Reality. At all costs, JJ has to keep the ball out of Seamus Callanan’s hand. That means sacrifice. You don’t play the ball. JJ sometimes has a basketball style stance, knees bent and hand across the front of the fella he is marking, looking out at the action. JJ will spend all afternoon doing that. Once the ball breaks and the other fellas clean it up, it’s job done for JJ.

If Callanan won’t oblige by standing still, JJ will have to make him oblige. If Callanan leaves the zone, JJ will have to call somebody else to do the job.

There is a fair case for Tipp to switch Bonner and Callan for stretches. Kilkenny aren’t supermen. Even JJ. No defender likes it when the job keeps changing.

Bonner Maher and Seamus Callanan are two different kettles of fish.

Behind all the blood and thunder in front of goals will be the two keepers. People will wonder if Darren Gleeson can reproduce the masterclass in distribution he gave in the All-Ireland semi-final. He probably won’t. Shouldn’t put himself under pressure to try. Beasts of a different colour. Kilkenny won’t set up so obligingly.

Getting short passes out will be like throwing meatballs past wolves in a forest.

What comes off will be a bonus, Tipp might only need one.

Whenever there was pre-game talk about my puck-outs on big days, I always liked to hit a couple of long ones at the start. Took my time, looked around as if I was looking for the short one, watched what they were doing, what they had practised.

Darren Gleeson needs to chill and control what can be controlled.

Kilkenny have a couple of odd question marks over whether their keeper will play or which one will play. They have both been along the line of Kilkenny goalies for the last 20 years, very solid but not spectacular. For some reason though, they have been making mistakes lately. That’s a worry.

In terms of game management, the doubt about the Kilkenny goalie isn’t good. Your goalie should be a long- term investment. You put your money down and stick. If he has the principles, the ability, the commitment and the mental strength, stick with him.

Game management is a huge issue. How much time can the goalkeeper waste in the course of a game. How often is he in a position to increase the tempo or to slow it down? When does he put pressure on one side of the field? When does he take the pressure off? When an opposition sub comes on, do you drop a puck-out or clearance onto him straight away? Do you know your own men enough that if one of them has dropped one ball, the will be guaranteed to win the next one, because of the character he has?

There’s hundreds of variables that your goalkeeper knows, apart from directing the movement when the pressure is on and timing the evacuation when the pressure is off. It’s a strange position for Kilkenny not to have settled long term.

How the goalies deal with things has a big influence on how midfield does. Tipp can be happy with the day they had against Cork a few weeks ago. It was one of those happy days when they should have got tattoos later on so they could look back and remember. Cork’s midfield played right into Tipp’s hands last time out.

This is different. Tipp will meet a better midfield on Sunday. They’ll meet Richie Hogan mainly. Effective. Economical. Cute and mean as a wasp. Beautiful striker.

Divine touch. Pound for pound the best hurler in the country this year.

What to do? Think outside the box. I think there is a serious case for Mickey Cahill on Hogan. Ask Cahill to sacrifice himself and handcuff himself to Hogan. Richie Hogan has vision. He runs with his head up. He has the Maradona type centre of gravity and strength.

Limerick made a tackle on Richie Hogan the last day that was sackable. Hogan would have seen it coming. He bounced off it and borrowed some momentum from it and hit the net just before half time. The bodies needed to be streaming in front of him, not streaming straight into him. You stand him up till he settles for a point of hits. Test him in that situation. If he is allowed play the game as he can, at his own frequency, that is the frequency that the game will be settled on.

He is so good, he is almost worth breaking the rule about flexible rules for. Put Mickey Cahill on him and tell him to man mark. Full stop.

Beyond those big match-ups there are the hidden hands. Tradition. Belief.

Down deep, and besides all of the pats on the head they issue to opponents, this Kilkenny team don’t really respect any other team.

Why should they?

If tradition isn’t on your side, it will kill you if it gets into your bloodstream. In very few games of hurling do two teams face up to each other carrying exactly the same amount of respect for each other. One team always respects the other a little less. Sometimes a lot less.

If the last few years have been a famine in Kilkenny terms, they have found the reasons for the famine within themselves. Injuries. Retirements. Transition.

They haven’t built up a collective memory of defeats to any county in particular.

Their memory is only directing them one way still. They don’t look at anybody else and say we knew what they were going to do to us but we just couldn’t stop it.

I met at a Limerick man at half-time during the All Ireland semi-final. The usual.

“Well?” I says.

“Not going bad at all,” he says “but I still think they’ll beat us by a couple of points in the finish.”

“Yep.” I said. “That’s ye’re problem right there in that sentence.”

If there’s a voice deep down in Tipp’s soul, a voice that can hardly even be heard and that voice is saying, “we’ve given it all but I still think they’ll beat us by a couple of points”, it’s game over.

If Kilkenny win, they will do what they always do. They’ll pat the beaten team on the head and say that they just served up some savage hurling but the losing team are fooling themselves if they think that when it was eyeball to eyeball, white knuckle time that Kilkenny feared them or truly respected them. That was the moment when Kilkenny finished them off. That’s a beautiful coldness for a team to have.

The Dubs, if they every truly had it, lost it last Sunday.

Manchester United are losing it.

Tipp need to pressure that belief. If you can swing the mindset of a successful team and bring them into unfamiliar territory, they’ll start to behave very strangely. Tipp need to make a bonfire of any doubts they have ever had.

Tradition is only of any use if the team without it let it get to them in any given situation.

Lastly the referee’s performance is fundamental. Like a Swiss clock, a Kilkenny cuckoo called Eddie (not the Fast version) pops out a few days before any modern All-Ireland and coos that it’s a man’s game and let it flow, etc etc.

It is all that but hurlers have to respect each other enough to let each other hurl fairly. They have to respect the game enough. Kilkenny became masters at playing on the edge and we all followed them. The dark arts became integrated into the game for a while without being called.

Barry Kelly has to forget the occasion on Sunday and serve the game. Hurling has been refereed better in the last couple of years.

Before that, the player’s mastery of fouling was evolving faster than the referees could manage. Things have improved but too many refs are playing out their own games on the field. Let it be fair and then let it flow. Respect.

Years ago, for our first final, a few of us Cork fellas hid a coin in a tree near Raglan Road in Dublin and every time we’d get back, we’d go find the tree on our walk the night before the big game. And we’d put the coin back and think that because it was there, we’d be back to see it again and to play again.

You never know the last day. Mortality and age man mark better than anybody. For all the lads on Sunday, that’s the key. Play like it’s the last time you’ll ever be there.

Leave a mark and a memory to be proud of.... @DonalOgC